There was more going on in City 17 than just what Gordon Freeman and Alyx were doing. Follow a new recruit as he struggles to find his place in the movement, and see just how sinister the Combine can be.

First off, the response to the demo has been fantastic. Thanks to everyone who downloaded and especially to those that offered encouragement and suggestions. To everyone watching the mod: yes, I'm very much still working on the full release.

I don't have any screen shots to show right now, but I wanted to talk about the development process and how the mod is progressing.

The demo I released recently was probably a weird part of my mod to release as a teaser, since it's literally the last part of the mod (at least, that I've designed so far). So now that I'm working on the "rest" of the mod, that includes the very beginning. I want the intro to the mod to be included in my next release, so I've been working hard. That means spending a lot of effort making it an action-packed, and immersive experience; one that sets the tone for the rest of the mod.

I really want the player to feel like the world they're running around in is alive and real. I'm planning to have lots of little scripted sequences and scenarios in the intro map, citizens walking around, minding their own business, birds flying around, etc. The problem is, of course, that all of this is a LOT of work. And since the player's experience in this map in particular depends heavily on the scripting, that means that there is a LOT of work to do in order to even properly test the map. Right now, that essentially means I have to trust that the design I have in mind will work like I am expecting, and that the next step is just to start blocking out all of the major scripted sequences for the map. Then comes iterating through it 50 times...

And it's going especially slowly for me, since I'm still not familiar with scripted sequences. So right now everything on that front is going slowly. But the good news is that the major layout for the map came together rather quickly.

From a purely design-oriented perspective, since I have lots of citizens walking around in my map, I'm having issues with them addressing the player as though he or she is Gordon Freeman, when they are not. Is there a way to suppress this behavior? Anyone had to work around this issue already? Any suggestions?

To change the addresing feature, there is a flag/setting that is "not commandable" or "dont interact with player"
or use a env_global to set it to gordanprecriminal, then they will be like "murph, gtfo"